A Social network and AN Application Content Provider (ACP) often neither interoperate with each other nor interoperate across different access networks. In addition, a social network and an ACP have no solid business plan, thus hurting the traditional telecommunication industry. For example, Skype is looking at advertising to keep a communication service free. An Application Exposure Suite (AES) is intended to provide network operators with the ability to expose open Application Program Interfaces (APIs) to an external third party and an internal application in a secure and controlled manner. With the AES, an ACP or an application content platform (including all of social networks) can interoperate with a telecommunication network in supporting network based services from the application platform.
However, a social network user or an application content user may not be a user of the telecommunication network. The social network user or the application content user may register with the telecommunication network as guest users in the services. This brings a problem of how to charge these guest users in the existing IMS charging architecture when an Online Charging System has no account balance or other data available in supporting the services in the telecommunication network.